I decided to overwrite my configuration file at /etc/grafana/grafana.ini during installation, but then I edited the port and domain. Be sure to remove the ; to uncomment the configuration.

Note that there are two config files:

/etc/grafana/grafana.ini

/usr/share/grafana/conf/defaults.ini

but you should only edit the one at /etc/grafarana

#################################### Server ####################################
# The http port to use
http_port = 4555
# The public facing domain name used to access grafana from a browser
domain = grafana.cozymisery.com

I then started up the Grafana service

$ sudo service grafana-server start

You can watch the log file by runnning sudo tail -20f /var/log/grafana/grafana.log

I created a firewall hole on my Amazon EC2 instance to allow inbound TCP traffic on port 4555 for my IP address. I confirmed I was able to visit Grafana and log in. The default user and password is admin/admin.

Making Grafana and InfluxDB play nice together

As it turns out, I didn't have to change any settings in Grafana for it to recognize InfluxDB as the datasource. My previous settings from the original setup worked just fine.

Helpful debugging commands

I had some difficulty opening up InfluxDB to the outside. That is to say, I was able to connect to InfluxDB on localhost but I wanted an external process to be able to send data to InfluxDB on a different machine.

Machine A has InfluxDB running on it. Machine B wants to send data to it.